IBM is announcing six new POWER9 scale-out servers today, with general availability set for March 20. IBM is touting these systems as future forward, cloud-ready infrastructure for mission critical workloads. The systems will max out with 4 TB of memory and will have PCIe Gen4 adapters, which doubles the bandwidth of Gen3 cards.

Articulating why customers should care about PowerAI can be challenging. In many cases this workload is handled by departments or organizations that are different from the ones we typically work with--read on to find out more.

Six years ago I wrote an article about how much I love AIX. It's a topic I've revisited a number of times.So let's have another AIX vs. Linux discussion. Certainly, plenty of folks are still talking about this, in their companies and on Twitter.

Readers of this blog know I'm old school. For instance, I still have a turntable and vinyl records, though I don't listen to them as often as I once did. I like to buy reliable old cars, maintain them, and drive them into the ground. In addition, I still have a landline with a wired (not wireless) headset, and when people talk about Slack, it makes me reminisce about IRC.

One of the great benefits of being an IBM Champion is the ability to attend IBM briefings about unannounced products. For instance, recently, IBM gave us some details about the new Linux-only POWER9 server. The AC922 (Machine Type 8335-GTG) for high-performance computing (HPC) is being officially announced today, and will be generally available Dec. 22.

IBM Systems Magazine is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. The editorial content of IBM Systems Magazine is placed on this website by MSP TechMedia under license from International Business Machines Corporation.